Jody L. Allen

Bio

Jody Lynn Allen, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of History at William & Mary, where she teaches U.S. history. A native of Hampton, Virginia, her research focuses on the experiences of Black Americans from the Civil War through the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Her book, Roses in December: Black Life in Hanover County, Virginia from Civil War to Civil Rights (UVA Press, 2025), traces a community’s transition from slavery through school desegregation. She is also co-producing The Green Light, a documentary film on Charles C. Green v. School Board of New Kent County (1968), a landmark Supreme Court decision that accelerated school integration across the South.

Allen’s scholarship explores African American history, public memory, and slavery. Her work has appeared in The Oral History Review and Slavery & Abolition.

From 2010 to 2025, she served as director of The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, which investigates and publicly interprets William & Mary’s historical and present relationship with African Americans. She was also a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of the South (2017–2018), where she taught African American history and consulted on the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.

In 2022, she was appointed by then–Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam to the Commission to Study Slavery and Subsequent De Jure and De Facto Racial and Economic Discrimination Against African Americans, serving until 2024. She currently serves as vice chair of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources State Review Board.